Recently I’ve been getting a lot of strange unsolicited phone calls from 800 numbers claiming to be my cell phone company or my bank or my credit card. In many cases, the calls are legitimate. If it’s a credit card company, they’re confirming some card activity and offering all the sensitive information. However, I’ve also been getting some suspicious ones at all. This last week, I had a phone call from someone who worked for a timeshare. I wasn’t interested in flying down for a three day, two night getaway in Florida and when I asked where they got my name, I got the “oh reception is breaking up *click*” That really put me on edge.

Then, a few days later, I received another phone call from someone telling me I was eligible for a promotion related to my “credit card that ended in…” and then rattled off four numbers (that matched a credit card I actively used). Again, when I asked them for their company name or how they found me, I god the “reception is breaking up *click*” treatment.

Lesson of the Day

If a company calls you out of the blue, be on your toes. Phishing isn’t limited to email, people lose sensitive information all the time because of phone calls like the ones I’ve been receiving. If a company calls you and you’re on the National Do Not Call Registry, get their information and file a complaint.

Whatever you do, don’t give up any information. If it’s really important, you can call them back at a published corporate phone number. Have them annotate your record.

Search

Lastly, if you’re curious, do a search of the number. When I searched for 877-671-1851, I discovered, through 800Notes, that it was Sprint trying to sell me a promotion (which matched what the CSR was trying to do). While you can’t trust everything you see online (anyone can put up a website that says their phone number is legimate), it can give you a good idea.

(Photo by _М и р К о__)

If you’ve ever seen Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, then you’re very well aware of the exploits of Mr. Frank Abagnale Jr. The story is about one of the most prolific check fraudsters. He’s passed a bad check in all fifty states as well as an additional twenty-six countries, before behind apprehended. Recently, US News had a chance to talk with him and he passed on five tips to prevent check fraud.

The tips are fairly straightforward - release as little information as possible, don’t use checks because they’re insecure, and check your register every single month. Diligence and common sense have always been and always will be the best defense against fraud.

Our home recently lost Internet access because our Verizon FiOS cable modem/router died (after only a couple months!) and my wife sauntered over to the library next door to prepare her taxes while I was at class Monday night. As you can imagine, when she told me this, after she’d prepared her taxes, I got nervous that she had put all that sensitive information through one of the publicly accessible computers at the library. Fortunately I was wrong, she was merely using her own computer connected to their network and thus safe in this regard.

I segregate the world of “personal/private information” into sensitive and routine information. Sensitive information covers all financial and personally identifying information such as bank and brokerage accounts, business assets, and anything account that would cause considerably harm if compromised. Routine information covers everything else including email. Loss of a routine information account wouldn’t cause too much harm (I’d be furious though) and wouldn’t compromise sensitive accounts. This means that sensitive and routine accounts never share the same password, this is a crucial step.

Why do I do this? Publicly accessible computers, such as terminals at libraries and hotels, aren’t within your control and so you never know what’s been done to them. At worst, they have keyloggers installed, either software or hardware, that log your every keystroke. Those keystrokes can be replayed back at a later time for someone to gain access to your accounts.

Also, I can’t trust myself to clear the cache, cookies, and other information every single time (on Firefox, it’s easy, go to Tools -> Clear Private Data or hit CTRL-SHIFT-DEL). What if I’m lax and click “Remember Me?” and leave myself logged in? What if I tell Firefox to save the password out of habit? What if I simply don’t log out and the next person on gets access to my information? Security breaches aren’t always the cause of a malicious act, sometimes they’re caused by user error or mistake meeting an ethically-gray opportunist.

Chances of theft are low. I recognize that the chances of someone installing a keylogger on a hotel computer or the chances of me leaving myself logged in and the next person being an ethically-gray opportunist is slim, but I see it as not being worth it. 99.99% of the time, I won’t ever need to log into a brokerage or bank account at the hotel so why bother?

Remember when someone actually needed to have your card before they could steal your data? With RFID, or radio frequency identification, all they need to be is near your card, with an $8 RFID reader, to get your information now! If you watch this episode of boing boing TV, you can see a $8 reader pull your card’s details from you without actually having your card. What can you get? Card name, cardholder’s name, and expiration date (probably more, you can transmit about 2 kB of data) - or essentially everything off the face of your card.

If you remember back to physics class, electricity and magnetism are inter-related. A magnetic field around a conductive material will generate an electric charge. If you want to get real nostalgic, remember the right hand rule? Anyway, RFID works off that principle. The reader sends out a magnetic signal that generates a current in the RFID chip. The current powers the chip and gets it to send out a signal that the reader will detect. The signal is encrypted, that’s not the problem, the problem is that it can be decrypted by the reader, a reader you can buy for $8. The security flaw has nothing to do with RFID technology, the failure is in the implementation by the credit card industry.

The technology expert in the clip, Pablos Holman, does point this out by saying the decryption should happen back at a secure location rather than at the point of sale and I suspect this is a cost cutting measure on the credit card industry’s part. By decrypting at the POS, they get to reuse their systems (i.e. use RFID on the cheap) as-is rather than building a mechanism for decrypting the data somewhere down the data stream. I’m 99.9% sure that someone in the entire industry has thought of the scenario in which someone buys an $8 reader and starts stealing data but it’s cheaper to fix the fraud than develop a better system.

As to the concerns that you could walk into a Starbucks and steal everyone’s data with a reader augmented with a powerful antennae, that’s not 100% accurate because an RFID tag has a read range based on its frequency. Smart cards are said to use high-frequency tags, which have a read range of 3′ or less. So while you could activate every card in the room, you’d have to wander within 3′ of everyone (still easy, just not as easy as turning it on and standing there) to grab the data.

If you want to learn more about RFID, check out the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility’s FAQ on RFID.

When the Federal Reserve lowered the target federal funds rate last week, lots of people started inquiring about refinancing options to see if they could get a better loan. I was among the crowd. I requested refinancing information through LendingTree and fielded a few offers before deciding that refinancing was not a viable option for me at the moment. One of the lenders pulled my credit and Equifax was obligated to tell me about it.

I learned that my score was a 643, not surprising that it’s not an awesome score because I recently closed out some balance transfer arbitrages, but the listing of items that adversely affected my score did concern me:

1. 78 - Serious delinqncy, derog, public recd or collection with balance
2. 58 - Insufficient length or lack of credit history
3. L - Length of time since legal item filed or collection item reported
4. F - Prop. of bal. to high cr. on bk rvlvng or all rvlvng accts
5. Y - Inquiries impacted the score but not significantly

Items 2 isn’t much of a concern overall and items 4 and 5 are certainly related to my balance transfer arbitrage days, but what about Items 1 and 3? Legal item? Collection item? Delinquency? This calls for a trip to the Equifax for a copy of my credit report (my one freebie each year) and a side trip to their Equifax Online Dispute page.

After reviewing my account, there was one entry in the Collections category for an account with “PPL ELECTRIC UTILITIES,” a power company that appears to be located in Pennsylvania. About a year ago I cleared up some errors on my credit report from another bureau for a cell phone that wasn’t mine, an social security number linked to my account plus some address history; could this be a leftover from that account? It appears so.

What’s infuriating is that the other SSN was identical except a six was replaced with a zero and Equifax felt it was “close enough” to link to my account! I don’t understand why it didn’t have to be an exact match. Anyway, I submitted a dispute and we’ll how quickly they can get that resolved.

There are plenty of reasons you should use a credit card instead of a debit card (if both are available) but here’s one that is especially compelling. A debit card is directly linked to your checking account, whereas a credit card is linked to an ephemeral credit limit. When Burger King accidentally bills you $2,243 instead of $22.43 or when they bill you $8,648 instead of $86.48, you aren’t suddenly emptied of all your funds.

Debit cards used to suffer from weaker fraud protection, that’s no longer the case. Debit cards used to be less widely accepted because they used a network that differed from credit cards, that’s less and less the case. However, debit cards will always be linked to your bank account (that’s by definition) so when someone accidentally enters in $2000 instead of $20, you’ll be out that money until someone is around to resolve it.

In the meanwhile, any checks you’ve written or any future debit transactions will result in NSF (not sufficient funds) and overdraft fees - which will likely put a smile on your bank’s face and a huge frown on yours.

So, if you want yet another reason not to use debit cards, this is a big one. Don’t underestimate the power of carelessness and stupidity.

Cash, cabbage, paper, scratch, scrizzle, dineros, dough, whatever you want to call it, it’s all means the same - it’s cold hard cash. There is plenty of useless and fun trivia about currency that is certainly fun to know and you guessed it, I’m going to give you at least fifty fun facts about currency, mostly US facts but a sprinkling of international ones near the end. The first bunch have to deal with US money history in general such as the creation of the Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, then moves onto specifics about the bills and coins such as what they are made of. Then we move onto some of the interesting facts that deal with counterfeiting. The 50 facts end with a few facts on what you should do with damaged or mutilated currency and then a few international facts for those of you looking to get an edge in Trivial Pursuit. I hope you enjoy it!

Oh, and in keeping with the tradition of these 50 fun facts posts, I added a few bonus facts so there are a few more than 50 in the list. If you enjoy this list, you might enjoy 50 Fun Facts about Credit Cards and 50 Fun Facts about Banks.

US Money History

• The Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first the issue paper money in the American colonies in 1690.
• The Bureau of Engraving and Printing of the Department of the Treasury didn’t become the sole producer of currency until 1877.
• In 1894, the production of postage stamps was added to the responsibilities of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.



• The Mint didn’t become part of the Department of the Treasury until 1873, before that they reported directly to the President.
• The Mint is responsible for producing military medals (such as the Silver and Bronze Stars, the Purple Heart and the Navy Cross) as well as the Congressional Medals.
• In 1865, the Secret Service Division of the Treasury Department was created to suppress counterfeit currency. Two years later, their mandate was expanded to include “detecting persons perpetrating frauds against the government.”
• As an aside: the Secret Service didn’t start informally protecting Presidents until Grover Cleveland in 1894. They officially began protecting Presidents until 1913 though they received funding (they received funding and began protection Presidents as far back as William McKinley in 1907).
• Legal tender refers to how currency can be used to satisfy “debts, public charges, taxes, and dues” but no one is required by law to accept it.

Bills & Coinage Facts

• According to the Treasury Department, there are three reasons why US currency is green (the “greenback”): 1) That color ink was readily available in large quantities back when they were first being printed; 2) It is highly resistant to chemical and physical changes, and; 3) it’s a color that the public identifies with strong and stable credit.
• Most coins have a copper filling with another metal on the outside, usually a mix of copper and nickel (75/25). Pennies are made of zinc coated in copper and nickels are entirely that copper and nickel mix.



• In 1943, pennies were made of zinc coated steel to conserve copper for the war, it gave them that silverly look.
• Between 1942 and 1945, during World War 2, nickels didn’t actually have nickel in them. It was a mix of copper, silver, and manganese.
• With the exception of WW2, nickel has stayed the same material composition since it was first designed in 1866. It’s the only coin that has stayed the same.
• Until 1804, none of the non-copper coins made in the US had their value engraved on it, people just had to know based on size. It wasn’t until the quarter in 1804 were the values engraved on the coin.
• The first batch of coins produced by the Mint was 11,178 copper cents in March 1793.
• “In God We Trust” was first put on coins in the Civil War but didn’t make it onto all coins until 1955.
• “E Pluribus Unum” was first used in 1795. “E Pluribus Unum” means “One from Many,” one country from many states.
• Abraham Lincoln was the first person to appear on a regular US coin in 1909.
• Queen Isabella of Spain was the first woman to appear on a US commemorative coin in 1893. She’s also the only real person to appear on a coin produced by the Mint.



• In general, living people don’t appear on US coins but Calvin Coolidge in 1926 became the first President on a coin while he was still alive.
• To determine which Mint facility produced a coin, look for an engraved letter on the front. “P” means it came from Philadelphia, “D” means it came from Denver, and “S” means it came from San Francisco.
• The lifespan of a coin is thirty years, the lifespan of a bill is a mere 18 months.
• Bills today are 2.61″ wide by 6.14″ long with a thickness of 0.0043″.
• Bills are made of a cotton (75%) and linen (25%) fiber mix known as “rag paper.” This is distinctly different from regular paper, made from the cellulose in trees. This helps the paper withstand wear and tear, like when you accidentally wash a hundred dollar bill in a pair of jeans!
• Nearly half the bills printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing are one dollar bills (~45.47%)
• 95% of the bills printed each year are used to replace bills already in circulation.
• Each bill is supposed to weigh about a gram, so there are 454 bills per pound. A million dollars in $100 bills would weigh a little over twenty-two pounds. If you used $1 bills, it’d be about a ton in weight.
• If you instead used pennies, a million dollars would weigh around 246 tons!
• If you were to stack a million $1 bills, it would be around 361 feet high.
• Only one woman has ever appeared on a bill… can you guess who it was? Martha Washington appeared on the $1 Silver Certificate of 1886 and 1891, then appeared on the back of that bill in 1896. Not a single woman since!
• It costs about 6.2 cents to print each bill (2007).
• The cost to make each coin varies because of the material inside of them but a USA Today article puts the price per penny at 1.23 cents and the price per nickel at around 5.73 as of mid-2006.
• During the Civil War, 3 cent bills (”fractional currency”) were printed because coins were being hoarded for their intrinsic value. The largest denomination bills were the $100,000 bank transfer note in 1934.

Counterfeiting Facts

• Do you know why there are ridges on the edges of coins? Back in the day, when coins were made of gold and silver, people would shave off or clip the edges of the coins and then save the shavings for later. While illegal, it was difficult to catch because coins were always irregularly shaped because of poor manufacturing so the ridges helped in detecting that.
• It wasn’t until 1877 that Congress passed a bill that prohibited the counterfeiting of any coin, gold or silver bar.
• It’s been estimated that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all bills in circulation after the Civil War were fakes! (this was the impetus for creating the Secret Service)
• In 1980, 777,957 $50 and $100 were passed and seized. That number increased to 1,240,840 by 1990. (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)
• In 1994, with the Crime Bill Public Law 103-322, Title 18 USC Section 470 was revised to state that “any person manufacturing, trafficking in, or possessing counterfeit U.S. currency abroad may be prosecuted as if the act occurred within the United States.”



• Counterfeiting money is a felony, convictions can result in prison sentences for as long as 15 years and fines of up to $15,000.
• If you counterfeit a coin worth more than 5 cents, you’re subject to the same laws. If you alter an existing coin, you are violating Title 18, Section 331 of the USC. The crime is punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 and/or prison time of up to 5 years.
• If you want to print funny money, make sure it’s a different size (50% larger or 25% smaller). If you print only in black and white, that’s okay too as long as you satisfy the size change.
• Counterfeit bill detecting pens work by reacting with the cellulose found in regular paper. Since bills produced by the government is made on this special rag paper, it doesn’t react in the same way to the pen.
• The ink used to print the bills are magnetic and so vending machines use that as one of the means of detecting whether a bill is legitimate (since it can’t rely on many of the usual methods people can such as touch).
• The Treasury Department is looking to enhance the designs of bills every 7-10 years. This began with the $20 bill in October 2003.

• On March 6th, 2004, Alice Regina Pike tried to pass a $1,000,000 bill at a Wal-Mart in Georgia (the largest bill in use is the $100). She might have gotten away if she only used a $200 bill!

Damaged/Mutilated Bills & Coins

• If you have a damaged bill and you have more than half, you can bring it to a commercial bank to be replaced. The bank will then send it to the Fed along with other damaged and worn bills.
• If it’s damaged and you have less than half, you’ll have to send it to the Treasury Department.
• Damaged coins? Same process, except the bank goes to the Mint.

International Money Facts

• Largest numerical denomination bill ever is 1 Milliard Hungarian Pengő (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) in 1946. (Wikipedia) It was only worth twenty cents US! Hyper-Inflation is rough.
• The oldest currency bills known to have existed come from China and the Han and Tan Dynasties. The earliest bills to still exist (as in not disintegrated) come from the Ming Dynasty and were issued between 1368-1399.
• The largest bill by size is the 100,000 Piso of the Philippines according to the Guinness Book of Records, it’s about the size of legal paper.
• In 180 other countries, differently denominated bills are different in either color or size or both. In the US, all bills are of uniform size and similarly colored - an issue that has been taken up with the courts lately.

If you thirst for more facts, there are plenty at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Also, if you’re a fan of looking at old bills, you can check out this incredible American Currency Exhibit provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Companies are getting more and more clever these days. Kim Palmer, who writes a US News & World Report money/business blog called Alpha Consumer, recently received (technically her husband received it ) a letter from the National Collegiate Lending Institute in which they were told they could receive a $300 debit card at no cost to them.

It turns out—surprise, surprise—that the offer is too good to be true. I called the number listed in the letter and learned that the “free service” is student loan consolidation. The $300 would be handed over only if we consolidated our student loans through the company and then provided a testimonial about it—hardly a 10-minute decision, especially when our student loans are already consolidated at decent interest rates. …

The lesson: Mail offering free money usually belongs in the trash.

What’s especially funny is the explanation and discussion that Kim has with David Tominus, sales manager and part owner of National Collegiate Lending Institute. Kim says its misleading (it is a litte), David says people should read the fine print (people don’t), and what it comes down to is that your average recent graduate is going to see $300 debit card, look at a relatively decent offer, and pull the trigger. NCLI is banking on that (and they do bank on it, 70-80 times a week).

Your recent grad won’t compare and contrast other offers as diligently because $300 right now is a lot of money (who can give a testimonial without actually using the service?). National Collegiate Lending Institute isn’t being misleading or doing anything disingenuous, they’re simply conducting business and consumers have to be smart enough to protect themselves (though if you do a search of National Collegiate Lending Institute in Google, the first few results are all about AG Cuomo’s investigation into their practices).

I’m all about keeping consumers as accountable for their actions as businesses are but why can’t businesses do business without this sort of chicanery?

The other day my fiancée received a letter from the Insurance Program Management office of Marsh Affinity Group Services, a service of Seabury & Smith, out of West Des Moines, IA. According to the letter, written by an Associate Benefit Specialist, Marsh had not received my fiancée’s premium payment for her AICHE-sponsored life insurance plan and her coverage was about to lapse. This letter would’ve been great… if my fiancée had AICHE-sponsored life insurance!

If I didn’t know better, or if she didn’t know better, she likely would’ve called the toll free number in the letter and asked to speak with Samuel Batterson to renew her life insurance policy if she was too busy to recall she didn’t actually have a policy with them. Is this a new style of fishing for clients or just a new style to us? I had seen this type of letter before in which webmasters were sent letters that looked like bills from Domain Registry of America in a scam to get them more business, but I’ve never seen it outside of that instance.

With so many different policies in our real lives, it’s easy to get confused as to which company holds which policy so it’s not entirely impossible for someone to get tricked by this. So, the lesson of the day is to be wary of these types of letters and do your homework. While it’s very likely my fiancée had some sort of AICHE policy while she was at school (and a member of AICHE), that’s a few years back so the coverage probably lapsed long ago anyway. Either way, when you get one of these just double check everything before calling (or sending a check!).

Wasn’t it great whenever you pulled up that yellow Community Chest card in Monopoly that awarded you with $200? In real life, that almost never happens and usually, in the event of an error, it’s always not in your favor. So what do you do? In most cases, you want to call your bank and make sure you have all the pertinent information so that they can resolve it as quickly as possible. In some cases, you’ll want to contact other agencies because fraud could be involved.

ATM Withdrawal or Deposit Discrepancies

First tip: Never deposit cash via an ATM. I never deposit cash in an ATM because if the envelope is lost, which is rarely is but definitely possible, there is absolutely no proof that I put cash into an envelope. With checks, at the very least you can ask the issuer to put out a stop payment and re-issue the check. In the event of a large check deposit into an ATM, I always take the ATM receipt because it identifies the time and ATM I used (the amount deposited is useless from the bank’s perspective because you entered it).

On withdrawals, if you request $100 and get only $20, your account will still be debited $100 unless you contact the bank. They can usually resolve the register and figure out where the mistake was and properly debit your account.

Automatic Debits You Didn’t Authorize

With the advent of Check 21 and the fact that banks don’t even need to send the paper checks around anymore, more and more check transactions are merely automatic debits and credits after some paper processing. At many banks, they just scan the front and back of the check and then process the electronic information, shredding the checks afterwards. As we all know, the OCR (optical character recognition) is pretty good but not 100% accurate, so what happens if there is a mis-read? This is the same procedure you should follow if you’ve fallen victim to an automatic debit scam, call your bank and notify them of the mistake. Usually they can trace back into their records, locate the check, and fix the error without incident. If you’ve been scammed, in addition to calling your bank, call your state’s attorney general as they will investigate and go after the scammer.